Testing is part of the software development process. The testing process includes verifying various aspects of the software's behavior, results, outputs, and the like, in connection with user supplied inputs.
A common phenomenon observed globally during software test automation of a software application which is developed for a particular functionality/domain is that the base application is taken as a baseline. Multiple variants of the software application, which could be region specific or certain business specific are created from the baseline application and released. These types of variant of the software application are typically planned with a very short project cycle time. For example, due to the global market for software applications, a particular software application may be internationalized (e.g., available in several languages). Therefore, it is typically necessary to test the application in each language in which it is available.
Software developers who customize the software, test the software and customizations to the software before releasing or distributing the software. The developers and entities that customize the software, test their software manually or spend significant resources creating an automated test script. A key requirement for testing such applications are to accelerate the testing through automation of test cases and executing them across all the variant releases, when any change is made to the baseline.
Several tools exist to assist in the development of test scripts. However, the existing tools generate test scripts that are specific to the user interfaces of the software applications that they are designed for. Even minor changes to the user interfaces of the software applications that the test scripts are designed for require significant changes in the test scripts to adapt them to the new user interface design. This is a technical challenge since even though the functional flow of the applications is almost same, variation in objects and the test data required are different across the various types of variant applications. In addition, maintenance and quicker reuse of the scripts with different test data is a challenge.
The existing test automation techniques do not completely address the problems stated above and lead to tedious as well as time consuming software test designing and automation process. Hence, there exists a need for a system and a method for generating universal test scripts for software testing across variants of the software application.